Bob Hodge

 Supervising doctoral students has long been a major part of Bob’s academic activities, challenging and rewarding. For 10 years between 1985 and 1995, at Murdoch University till 1993 and then at the University of Western Sydney, and also in Mexico, he drifted into a particular kind of thesis supervision and examination, taking on a range of topics that were difficult to classify in disciplinary terms, which neither he nor anyone else was obviously equipped to supervise but which definitely needed considerable support, and a new kind of expertise. Most of these were from very committed mature students who wanted to pursue their thesis work wherever it took them, and needed a lot of guidance about the rules of transdisciplinary, metadisciplinary research, and how to manage originality in a form of study that in practice often made it difficult. Out of reflection on this came a widely used manifesto, ‘Monstrous Knowledge: Doing PhDs in the New Humanities’ 1995  published in a special issue of The Australian Universities Review devoted to Postgraduate education, edited by Alison Lee and Bill Green (one of Bob’s former students, who illustrated all the qualities indicated above to a high degree).

Bob tried to implement these principles, first in the School of Humanitiesat UWS Hawkesbury and then in the CCR. In addition to continuing to supervise a wide range of students (including many cases of ‘rescue’, students who had almost given up or had been declared lost causes) he worked closely with Professor Brett Neilson and others in the CCR to develop workshops and other strategies to prepare students to follow innovative, interdisciplinary theses which would make a difference. He also worked closely with Dr Zoe Sofoulis and others to develop a professional doctorate in Cultural Research, problem-oriented, interdisciplinary and engaged, in which the topic and process of the thesis would be negotiated with some external organisation in industry or the community. The program admitted its first students in 2006. In 2006 the CCR team, headed by Bob, were Highly Commended in the Vice-Chancellor’s award for these achievements in postgraduate education.

PDF of Monstrous Knowledge reproduced with kind permission of Australian Universities Review , online at http://www.nteu.org.au/publications/aur.